"Ethan Frome" and the Themes of Edith Wharton's Fiction

Abstract

ALTHOUGH much-perhaps too much-has been made of that minor classic of our literature, Ethan Frome, as a picture of New England life and as a triumph of style and construction, its relation to Edith Wharton's more characteristic and important stories has never been clearly established. Ethan Frome is not a sport. It belongs to the main tradition of Mrs. Wharton's fiction, and it has a value, independent of its subject and technique, in helping us to define that tradition. Alfred Kazin has linked it to The House of Mirth as a demonstration of the spiritual value of failure, but although this is a recurrent theme in Edith Wharton, particularly in the novels she wrote in the twenties, and is inescapable in the conclusion of The House of Mirth, it is no mean feat, I think, to reconcile it with the episode which forms the narrative framework of Ethan Frome. It is possible, as I intend to suggest, that the spectacle of Ethan's prolonged and hopeless defeat, reinforced by the glimpses of his spiritual isolation, his scarred and twisted body, and his querulous, demanding womenfolk, is intended to convey quite the opposite of what Mr. Kazin finds in the story. Having said this, I must add that this essay is only incidentally concerned with Ethan Frome. The best known of Edith Wharton's stories, it offers a familiar peg on which to hang certain generalizations that I want to make about her fictional themes. The generalizations are my main concern, but Ethan Frome has the virtue of illustrating them more clearly and simply perhaps than does any of the major novels. Beginning with The Fruit of The Tree (1907), the argument of Mrs. Wharton's novels focuses with varying depth but remarkable consistency on a single problem, which she once defined (although not with reference to her own work)